


Either Die A Hero

by Enigmatree



Series: Monsters [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Crazy Dean Winchester, Dark Castiel, Dark Dean Winchester, Gen, Not Beta Read, POV John Winchester, Time Travel, honestly dean's so crazy I'm warning you, so read at your own discretion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 13:52:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16306400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enigmatree/pseuds/Enigmatree
Summary: John brings his boys with him to Bobby's when the man finds something interesting that he claims they need to see. Dean is excited about the situation. Sam is curious and interested. Bobby is apparently already resigned to the weirdness John keeps bringing down on him, having long left them alone in his dank basement. None of them seems to understand just why John doesn’t like this. Not one bit.In the basement of Bobby's house, tied to a bolted metal chair, is a blond man older than Dean by at least twenty years, maybe even thirty. He is starved and gaunt. He is so tightly covered in scars that his skin looks like glass after a bullet hit, cracked thinly into spiderwebs.He is Dean.Except, damn. John wishes he wasn’t.(Inspired by that Tumblr post that says; 'What if all of Supernatural is just Dean's backstory and he's the real villain?')





	Either Die A Hero

**Author's Note:**

> I'm warning you guys once again; I'm sick and this is really not edited-- if you find any errors, tell me and I'll correct them. ^-^ There is a sequel planned but not promised, so if you'd like to be ready for the chance that I'll write it, subscribe to the series.
> 
> Please enjoy. 
> 
> Serious Warning; A super crazy Dean, graphic description of a murder, John Winchester.

 

Bobby’s dungeon, or whatever survivalist name he put on it, is bare concrete under the layers and layers of dust and the multitudes of sigils, and John never wished he wasn’t a hunter more than he did when he first entered the musty air of the sealed off room. He doesn’t know how Dean and Sam manage to be unaffected, but John is having trouble breathing in the heavy, still air inside. He wants to opt out and stay behind the entrance where there is fresh air but if he did that, his sons would have to deal with this alone.

And that is plain unacceptable.

“Oh, this is awesome. Do you see how cool I am, Sam!” Dean gushes, leaning close to the chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Sam has his back turned to John, but his eyeroll is audible all the way to the continent of Africa so John doesn’t need to see it to now his reaction.

Dean is excited about the situation. Sam is curious and interested. Bobby is apparently already resigned to the weirdness John keeps bringing down on him, having long left them alone in his dank basement. Perhaps, in this particular situation, he’s the sanest of them all.

In the end, though, none of them seems to understand just why John doesn’t like this. Not one bit.

“We don't know if he’s you yet, Dean. It might just be some new monster we haven’t heard of before.” Sam huffs, sarcastic and know-it-all and practically oozing out all of his sixteen-years-old attitude in a way Dean never did.

The man Bobby found yesterday, unconscious on the floor of his living room, isn’t a monster. At least not one they know how to test for. And between Bobby and John, they know to test for quite a lot.

The unconscious man is older than Dean by at least twenty years, maybe even thirty. He is starved and gaunt. He is so tightly covered in scars that his skin looks like glass after a bullet hit, cracked thinly into spiderwebs.

John scrutinizes him as carefully as he can under the sickly-yellow ceiling lights beaming down over the metal chair they tied him to.

He is Dean.

Except, damn. John wishes he wasn’t.

“So, I guess I’m badass for _at least_ one more decade.” Dean laughs, proud of the deep jagged lines marring his future self’s face, proud of the road dust that sticks onto him like a second skin, engraved into it in ways not even John’s years on the hunt have caused. Proud of his future suffering just like his dad taught him to be, and John feels the guilt burrow just a little bit deeper under his ribs. “I wonder if he’ll tell us some interesting stories.”

There are questions that John knows he will ask, demands that he already has planned but all of those hunter-responsibilities aside, the small and dimmed father inside John hopes they don’t hear a single interesting story. He doesn’t want to know what happened to make the bright young son of his into this broken hunter. But Yellow-Eyes lurks just outside his reach, and Sammy’s state of being has been hung on a balance by some recent revelations he got— John _has_ to interrogate this man.

Sam grumbles, “If he really is from the future, we can’t let him tell us anything, Dean. What if we accidentally create a paradox? Time travel is nothing to mess around with.”

John wants to tell him that they have more important things to worry about, but he falls silent when Dean—not Dean—the man wakes up. He doesn’t even stir. Not so much as a hitch in his breath is heard, not even a twitch, before he straightens fully from his slouch on the chair he’s tied to.

How long was he awake before deciding to make his presence known? John didn’t notice it, despite the seventeen years of hunting experience under his belt that he trusts more than anything else. That trust has done him shit ton of good today.

Even now that he knows the man was awake, John can’t pinpoint when exactly he woke up.

He’s good. Too good.

John steps closer to the chair, placing his sons just slightly farther in comparison.

The older blond leans back comfortably into the chair the moment he’s up, looking for all the world like he’s lounging in his own lawn chair. The binds on his wrists don't even make him pause. He raises his leg, putting ankle over knee and rolling his shoulders back in a slouch.

The creeping darkness of the basement settles comfortably around him, shadowing his cheeks and razor-sharp smile, catching his too-familiar-too-alien green eyes, tracing his ugly scars in white. He looks like Dean. But he doesn’t look human.

“Well, fuck me dead,” He says by way of greeting, grin jagged and acidic. “Isn’t this dad.”

John looks at his boys next to him. They are silent now, leaving the talking to him —though he suspects it’s only temporary in Sam’s case— and that leaves John to answer the older Dean. The Dean who’s now watching him, amused, with an unfamiliar, birdlike head-tilt. He’s never seen anyone do that before.

It creeps him out.

He shakes it off.

The man raises a single blond eyebrow over deadpan green eyes. “Wow.” He snorts— chin up, gaze cutting. Looking down on the taller John from where he’s tied sitting down.  “Not even a hello? You’re really showing the love today, aren’t you.”

John ignores him. “Who are you?” He starts with, despite knowing that they won’t get further than their already existing guess. It’s not like they can confirm this time-travelling-future-Dean theory. “What are you doing here?”

“How cruel, Daddy.” The man croons, puckering his lips, and John notices from the corner of his eye as Dean —his Dean, _the_ Dean— recoils. The older one notices it too because his lips twist this time into an all too familiar shit-eating grin, “You don't recognize your own son? It’s me. Dean.”

John knows that already— if only he didn’t. He clenches his teeth and opens his mouth but before he can demand more answers, the older Dean throws his head back with a worrying crack and bursts out laughing. His tone is the same as Dean’s —John’s Dean— when Sam says something especially amusing, or when John cracks a rare joke. His voice, however…

John’s eyes slide towards the bulging scar going around the laughing man’s throat in a semi-circle, a single straight line of a horrific length. It looks fatal. A human cannot have his head cut more than half off and survive after a few stitches.

But Dean has survived it with nothing more to show than a scar and a bad, hoarse crack to his voice.

John tries not to wonder how.

He fails.

“What are you doing here?” Sam repeats— loudly because this older Dean’s gravelly barks of laughter are echoing like thunder around the dark basement walls. “You’re from the future, aren’t you? What are you doing in this time?”

The laughter cuts off abruptly, almost like it was never there, and the time-traveller lowers his head slowly, haltingly. Eventually, cat-green eyes land on John’s younger son and the smile that lights up like wildfire on the man’s face stretches his scars to further corners.

“Hey Sammy.” He murmurs, broken voice reverent in its sudden quietness. “It’s been a while.”

John has never heard anything more ominous than this.

Sam visibly swallows, feet shuffling in what John thinks might be an attempt for his lifetime-long habit of ducking behind his older brother, but he finally steels himself in place. He, with obvious effort, doesn’t flinch back from the future incarnation of his brother. “What are you doing here?” He repeats.

The feeble overhanging lightbulb flickers above. Dust motes swirl under the sickly light. The time-traveller’s eyes rake John’s younger son’s face, what before looked more like green chips of ice warming a little, taking on a shade of humanity. But the older Dean doesn’t open his mouth to answer. He just watches Sam.

Seconds pass by without any answer, and John can’t seem to collect the will to break the silence. There’s just something very pointed about the way this unfamiliar, alien Dean watches his not-really-brother and it’s keeping John’s thoughts glued, his attention unable to stray— similar to watching a train-wreck, or a car crash. He can’t decide what it is that pokes him so obtrusively in the eyes.

Under his pale skin, Sam’s muscles get tenser and tenser with every silent flicker of the light, his eyes narrowing in anger. Someone’s going to break the silence, and it’s not going to be their prisoner— the older blond’s eyes are relaxing and his face is growing more untensed the more he looks at Sam.

The stalemate breaks not with Sam shouting or the scarred man answering the question, but with Dean’s —his Dean, younger Dean— progressively louder humming coming from the back. The notes are familiar to John, something from his cassettes back in the Impala, something—

“Humming Metallica?” The older Dean scoffs, gaze barely brushing across his younger self before going back to Sam, “Wuss.”

John glances back to see the odd sight of seeing his eldest son blush and pale at the same time.

“Leave him alone, asshole!” Sam snarls, possibly to protect his brother and equally as possibly because he’s still angry at being ignored, and the time-traveller smiles softly at this. It only seems to make Sam bare his teeth further, looking ready to shout at the blond until one or both of them are too tired to fight. John would know: It’s been Sam’s favourite tactic for a year and then some since he stepped past fifteen.

“Oh, Sammy,” The blond tuts with his crackling, fucked-up voice, “Let the man stand up for _himself_. You don't have to protect the big baby, he can take care of himself. It’s not worth the effort.” The flickering light glints for barely a second in his animal-green eyes, but it does, and John knows that they all saw it. The glint isn’t even in anything preternatural, and yet goosebumps crawl up John’s skin like flash tide. “You need to look out for yourself, after all— who will, if you don’t?”

The smile on his face grows bigger and more condescending by the second —it’s a horrific parody of Dean’s teasing smile— and its right edge drags along the far end of the longest scar on his face. It’s a gigantic scar that starts up in the middle of his forehead, turning sharply over his nose and sliding down through the corner of his lip. It’s too smooth, too clean and it looks odd to John’s eyes, more a tattoo than a battle scar, but what _hasn’t_ been odd since this morning? He snatches his gaze away. 

When he looks around himself once again, he sees that Sam looks puzzled, eyes flickering between the two blonds, while his Dean, the actual Dean, is a closed-off wall with a stillness to his eyes that John hasn’t seen him show in front of the most horrible of corpses. He looks like a badly drawn painting; the body there but the spark of life missing, face sapped of all emotions. The foreboding feeling that was budding inside John starts to flood through his guts.

“I can take care of him.” His Dean declares. His voice is as emotionless as his eyes and body-language are, and the look is disconcerting to see on his lively, optimistic older son.

The time-traveller Dean leans even further back into his chair. When he grins, his teeth flash white through the black gloom casting shadows over his face. “I’m _sure_ you can, mini-me.” He drawls, and that too is a tone so unlike Dean that John feels like he’s watching two skinwalkers converse before him. “Just don’t hurt anything trying to play with the big boys, no? Not all of us can keep up with the great Dean Winchester, not without losing a limb or two. It’s better to let go before it’s too late. Before you _fail_ , without a doubt.”

“I won’t fail.” The younger Dean declares, voice carved from stone, “Just because you failed doesn’t mean I will.”

“So brainless,” The time-traveller scoffs, “ _You_ were the one who failed, not me. _I_ have been trying to fix everything you broke. Some things don’t ever come back when some overconfident idiot fucks it up, you know.”

John’s gaze flickers between the two blonds, trying to make some sense out of the conversation. He can’t tell what they are talking about at all; the entire talk feels like it’s been forged in a code he doesn’t have the key for.

“I’m not gonna let it happen.” Dean says and —there it is, the first crack in his stone-mask— his voice trembles and wavers before steeling back, “I’m gonna stop it, no matter what.” 

Once again, and equally as suddenly, the time-traveller throws his head back to let out hoarse guffaws. His reactions ripple and change like a thin sheen of oil over water, and he looks at once both genuinely entertained and thoroughly sarcastic. He laughs so loudly that the last mounds of still dust on the floor rise up with the force of his shaking, he laughs and laughs and laughs until John wonders if he should intervene after all.

And then, he stops.

Just like that.

“Let’s go,” He says.

“Yes, Dean.” Comes a low and thoroughly unexpected voice. Some stranger in jeans and a trench-coat steps out of thin air right next to the older Dean, only to kneel down and start untying his hands. He’s a dishelved looking man, younger than the old-Dean but definitely above his thirties, with windswept hair and dark stubble. He doesn’t so much as glance their way when both John and his well-trained sons hurry to draw their guns out and point at him.

“Step away from him.” John orders.

The man continues to ignore him, leaning forward on his knees as he unspools the rope from around the older blond’s right hand. There’s something unnerving about his movements, about the concentration with which the man unties old-Dean, ignoring them all so thoroughly. John wonders if this odd man can even see them standing there, threatening him, or if the only thing he sees is the length of the rope and the time-traveller tied under it.

John fingers the safety, and he can’t help the swirl of anxiety bubbling in his stomach. Even besides his appearance and lack of reaction to the threat of firearms, there’s something to this man. Something more. Something that makes all the air in the basement tilt towards him, gravity and weight curling around where he is kneeling.

“I told you to step away.” John says, and he can feel Sam shift beside him, probably not wanting to shoot despite having seen first-hand how the creature appeared from thin air. This time, John understands that feeling, though his empathy has nothing to do with compassion and everything to do with caution. “You have three seconds. Three. Tw—”

_Bang!_

Dean’s gun jumps with the recoil, but the blond doesn’t let it stray from the target.

His young face tightens into grim lines.

The strange man still hasn’t looked up from his work, but the time-traveller is watching them all with an acidic look of bubbling amusement on his face. The crumpled bullet slides down the man-creature’s unmoving head, tangling through his black hair, then clatters onto the cheap cement floor with resounding finality.

It’s a consecrated silver round, supposed to work on everything from vampires to werewolves, making even demons flinch.

This thing, whatever it is, is much _much_ stronger than anything John has ever faced.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Old-Dean tuts again, and John —when he looks away from the creature now untying the man’s left hand— follows the time-traveller’s gaze to the real Dean’s hand where he’s holding his favourite bowie knife. “I tried it once,” The time-traveller continues, “doesn’t really work.”

John isn’t even going to contemplate what that could mean, not the fact that Dean is apparently friends with something he tried to stab, not the fact that this creature is effectively immortal, not the fact that it apparently listens to Dean. Nothing.

The younger and more comprehensible Dean hesitates for a second with the blade in his hand, but John knows that he’ll eventually snap and attack. Except, in that small amount of time, the creature kneeling on the cement floor finishes untying their prisoner and the two stand up together.

John feels his muscles tighten. “Wait—”

“Are the others all here yet?” The older Dean asks towards his monster and the monster shakes his head. John grits his teeth. It’s like now that he’s lost his novelty, John doesn’t exist at all. “Slowpokes.”

The creature dips his head but stays silent.

“I may not be able to shoot him but I sure as hell can shoot you so _fucking_ _freeze_.” Comes the unexpected growl from next to John. It’s the real Dean and he’s pointing his Taurus to his older self with a wild snarl on his face. “You don’t get to say shit like that and then disappear. _Who did it_?!”

The time-traveller glances at the blond from up above, despite being approximately the same height, with those alien green eyes that look even more condescending now that he’s standing. The grin on his face is plastered on. “Why so serious?” He asks, pauses and laughs.

It doesn’t matter what crazy things he says. The real Dean won’t hear him, not until he’s given the answer he demands. John knows this as well as he knows that a sharp knife will cut and that a werewolf on a hunt will kill. This is one of the sides to Dean that remind him painfully of Mary, but in these circumstances, it’s a harbour of familiarity. She, too, used to turn vicious when she thought her family was threatened.

“ _Who did it_.” Dean asks, deadly slow.

There’s a crash behind John and he only glances there for a single second to see Sam, young and scared, with his sheet-white face falling in dawning realization. The boy’s hands are shaking and he has his back digging into one of the tables Bobby has in his basement, books and tools scattered on the floor around him. Whatever the two Deans are talking about, Sam has it figured out. And it’s not pretty.

Then it’s almost all a blur as his Dean screams low and desperate “ _Who did it?!_ ” at his future self, as Sam starts swearing-whispering behind him, as the man-creature turns his back and places a hand on the time-traveller’s shoulder and the younger Dean shoots his other self— once, twice, until the gun clicks, empty.

The trench-coated creature’s other arm drops down from in front of the blond.

The bullets clatter impotently on the ground when the monster opens his hand to drop them.

“Me.” The wrong, alien Dean says. “You. _We_ did it.”

“No.” Dean shakes his head, “I wouldn’t.”

“You did.”

“I won’t.” Dean declares in a hoarse whisper. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

Suddenly, the code cracks and the realization of what they’re talking about climbs through the cracks of John’s denial.

“Oh, yes,” The other Dean whispers in answer, letting his too-wide, too-sharp grin spread on his scarred skin and when he leans forward into the light, lingering shadows claw around his face in skeletal lines. “You’ll put your hands on his cheeks, smile, look into his eyes. You’ll tell him that his hair is so long you couldn’t recognize him from a girl. You’ll make him laugh, you’ll make his eyes light up. You’ll twist your hands.”

“No.” Dean chokes out, “No. no, no, no—”

The older, fucked-up Dean traces a finger down the biggest scar on his face, the oddly smooth one, as he steps closer; “You’ll hear a crack. Just a crack and that’s it. There won’t be blood. There won’t be tears. Just you with your hands on a slack face and a still-warm corpse with his eyes empty because the soul isn’t inside anymore, he’s somewhere else _far_ away from this meatsuit.”

Jesus— “meat suit”, _Jesus_. Bile is burning in the back of John’s mouth and his legs feel soft beneath him.

“And you’ll have killed him. Just like that. The cold dead corpse of another Winchester.” The time-traveller laughs mocking and loud— God but he laughs so much, so much more than John’s Dean does. “The cold dead corpse of your favourite little brother.”

Next to him, his Dean breaks down. The kid turns around and runs— and in a few seconds, John can hear the sounds of retching and choking and sobbing upstairs, probably in the bathroom. He doesn’t think Dean will be able to get out of there in any form close to consciousness.

Behind him, Sam is whimpering quietly. Shivering, if the sounds of rattling tools on the unsteady, metal table are any indication. Scared. Terrified, because Dean is his last line of defence, his only real shield in a world full of weapons. Dean is— _is supposed to be_ his protection from everyone, even John.

And in front of him is the time traveller and his companion, the monsters that just shattered John’s remaining family into jagged little pieces.

Fury sears through him. “I will hunt you down. Mark my words; I _will_ hunt you down.”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” The man laughs and the black-haired creature puts a hand on him. “But think on this, as you come— You don’t have anyone but yourself to blame, really.”

They’re gone the next second.

 

 

 


End file.
